Mijung Lim (임미정) is a South Korean jazz pianist, composer and bandleader who has made six albums under her own name, from Flying in 2003 to Impromptu in 2025, and who teaches in the Practical Music Department of Hanyang Women's University in Seoul. On February 26, 2026, Impromptu won Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the 23rd Korean Music Awards. Her name is romanized several ways: her recent releases and streaming pages use Mijung Lim, the cover of Flow reads Mi Jung Lim, the covers of her first, second and fourth albums read Lim Mi Jung, and Korean newspapers print Im Mi-jung, Yim Mi-jung or Lim Mi-jung. She is not the classical pianist of the same name, born in 1965, who teaches at Hansei University. Her own birth date and birthplace are not published; the newspaper Hankook Ilbo gave her age as 36 in September 2006.

Her training ran through Seoul and the United States. Her record label's biography lists the Seoul Institute of the Arts, Berklee College of Music and a master's degree in jazz piano at the Manhattan School of Music, completed in 2005. Berklee's alumni magazine counts her among its Korean graduates who went on to teach, lists her as class of 2004, and says that a former student of the Berklee alumnus Won-young Chung and other Berklee graduates took their advice and continued her jazz studies at Berklee with Joanne Brackeen; her label gives the graduation year as 2002. Berklee's archive holds two of her student recital programs from 2001, both listing her as a pianist from Seoul. On July 5 she presented "The Song and the Moon" with the saxophonist George Garzone, the trumpeter Satoru Ohashi, the faculty bassist Joshua Davis and the drummer Miki Matsuki, with every selection arranged by her. On October 31 she presented "In the Rain" with the saxophonists Walter Smith and Kristof Bacso, the drummer Kendrick Scott, the percussionist Matt Kilmer, the singer Hye Wan Lee and the bassist Davis, in a program that included her arrangement of a piece by Wayne Shorter. According to Hankook Ilbo, she spent four years in the United States before returning to Korea for good at the end of December 2005, and in that time led her own quartet in New York clubs including Birdland and toured Italy with the vocalist Nnenna Freelon.

Her first album, Flying, came out on March 1, 2003. The cover bills it as Lim Mi Jung and names Tom Harrell, George Garzone, Donny McCaslin, Joris Teepe and Ralph Peterson on its front. Its ten tracks include "The Song Is You", "All the Things You Are" and a title piece, "Flying", and Hankook Ilbo reported that a track from it was used in the film Wig (가발). The MM JAZZ critic Yeo In-gyeong dates her debut to 2003. In the same year she is on the project album Jazz-O-Tech, where the Kyeonggi Ilbo named her as the pianist on "After Hours", and on the vocal album Nouveau Son (With33Music), where Discogs credits her on piano.

In the Rain followed on July 1, 2006, with ten tracks, some of them her own compositions and some by other writers chosen for personal reasons, according to the jazz site JazzSpace, which called it a post-bop record with modern composition, rooted in the New York scene, with the saxophonist Gregory Tardy prominent and the drummer Billy Drummond named alongside him, and said the piano shapes the emotional flow of the record. Hankook Ilbo named the drummer Gene Jackson among three players from the sessions who flew to Seoul for her first solo concert under her own name, "True Jazz Live", on September 30, 2006, and said she was due to play a jazz festival in France in November. "Six Steps in Red" was also chosen for Rainbow, a JazzPeople sampler of the year's Korean jazz, which Discogs dates to 2007.

3+1 (Pungryu Music, November 2010) is a piano trio record with Teepe on bass and Jackson on drums, and the saxophonist Benny Golson as a guest on its first and sixth tracks, "Whisper Not" and "I Remember Clifford". Six of its nine tracks were composed and arranged for the trio. The trio's track "River" was also chosen for Into the Light: Korean Music III, a two-disc survey of Korean music issued by the Korea Arts Management Service, whose second disc is given to jazz; in a 2010 review for All About Jazz, Ian Patterson praised her right-hand technique and her gift for a pretty tune and said the repeated motif of "River" created the illusion of flowing water.

Composure (February 26, 2019) was her first album in eight years. Its seven originals and a version of "Stardust" are played in solo, trio and quartet settings with the guitarist 한운기, the bassist Kim Dae-ho (김대호) and the drummer 이도헌; the cover is Kim Whanki's 1966 painting Sounds of Spring, used with the permission of the Whanki Museum, and "Lullaby" is a solo piece she wrote for her son. Flow (December 9, 2022) is her first trio album for piano, bass and drums, with Kim Dae-ho and the drummer Kim Jong-guk (김종국), nine originals and a running time of 63 minutes. It was recorded at Eum Sound by Ji Yeop Kim, and it was nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Album at the 21st Korean Music Awards, whose nominees were announced on January 26, 2024. A two-track single for piano and guitar, "Autumn Consolation" and "I Wish", followed on December 22, 2023.

For Impromptu (November 26, 2025) she went back to New York, the city where she studied. The eight originals are played by a quartet with the trumpeter and flugelhornist Nadje Noordhuis, the bassist Matt Penman and the drummer Jimmy Macbride, except "Portrait of Strayhorn", a piano trio piece in tribute to Billy Strayhorn. Marc Urselli recorded it at EastSide Sound and mixed it at Audio Confidential, and David Kowalski mastered it at Teaneck Sound. In a December 2025 review, MM JAZZ called her one of the pillars of the Korean jazz scene and likened her playing on "Portrait of Strayhorn" to that of Kenny Barron. The awards ceremony took place on February 26, 2026 at Musinsa Garage in Seoul's Hongdae district, and Hanyang Women's University announced the award on March 4. EBS broadcast a Space Gonggam set on September 23, 2026 in which she played "Impromptu", "Sketches of Spring" and "Subtle Notice" with Noordhuis, whom Topstar News described as her collaborator of about 22 years.

Outside her own records, she is the pianist on both albums of the Korean jazz vocalist Hae In Cho, Compromise (2022) and Sight Beyond Sight (2024), and arranged most of the tracks on the first of them; those sessions were recorded at Eum Sound, the studio where Flow was made, with the same engineer. Discogs credits her with arranging and playing piano on four tracks ("Balenos 42nd Street", "Mediahn Panorama", "Sunday in Serendia" and a live version of "Olvian Blue") of Black Desert (10th Anniversary), a 2025 vinyl set of music from the video game, and a May 2022 Pearl Abyss announcement of jazz versions of four Black Desert songs names a pianist, Mi Jung Lim, among the Korean jazz musicians who contributed expertise. Her label's biography adds that she has played the Jarasum Jazz Festival, the Tongyeong International Music Festival and the Seoul Winter Jazz Festival, and has performed with Freelon, Golson, Jackson, Teepe and Seamus Blake. The department page of Hanyang Women's University lists her as a professor teaching improvisation technique, jazz ensemble and major practicum.

Several things about her are not recorded in the sources located. No source gives her birth date or birthplace, the full personnel and instruments for In the Rain, or the recording dates of her first two albums, and 3+1 is not on the major streaming services.

She has not been quoted in the sources located on which pianists shaped her, so this section sticks to what the records and the writing about them show. Her own words, to a Korean newspaper in September 2026, describe jazz as the freedom to play what you like and the thrill when the timing among the musicians clicks perfectly.

The writing about her records agrees on two strengths. Yeo In-gyeong of MM JAZZ names a fluent, steady touch and a gift for composition, especially ballads, and hears her post-bop pieces sharpening on Impromptu, in "Impromptu", "Subtle Notice" and "Light". JazzSpace places In the Rain in a global post-bop style with a personality of its own, and All About Jazz heard in her playing on "River" a likeness to the Japanese pianist Eri Yamamoto.

The records show a composer who returns to her own material. She used the title "River" on both 3+1 (2010) and Flow (2022), where it was written after watching the Han River at night; "Heart Song", a lyrical waltz, is on Composure and Flow; "Light", built from a run of major chords with a 7/4 section that has no tonal center, is on Flow and again on Impromptu. The label's notes say three of her songs across the albums share a river theme. Her formats vary, from solo piano to a trio to quartets with a trumpet or a saxophone, and Impromptu keeps the players' improvised takes largely unedited, with the title piece and its second part built from a single motif.